Canada’s transit systems, ranked

Does your city have the best public transit in Canada?

Anyone who takes a bus, commuter train, streetcar, subway or ferry on a regular basis likely has strong opinions about it’s performance. In that spirit, transit researcher Nathan Pachal of the South Fraser Blog has put together the third annual Transit Report Card of Major Canadian Regions. The report assesses Canada’s six main populated centres: Greater Calgary, Greater Edmonton, Greater Toronto & Hamilton, Metro Vancouver, Greater Montreal and National Capital Region.

Letter grades were given for each criteria, and then an overall letter grade was awarded. An “A” means better than expected when compared to other regions’ transit, “B” means comparable and “C” means lower than expected.

The assessment looks at four main criteria:

• Revenue kilometres per service hour: The distance traveled by the transit system for each hour of service. The greater the number of kilometres, the faster the transit system is (or the larger the area serviced).

• Farebox recovery: Assessing how much of the money collected from fares goes towards operating expenses, versus how much of the expenses are covered by taxes. A transit system that can be supported by the fares collected from riders is ranked higher than one that needs taxes to be sustained.

• Operating cost per service hour: How much it costs to run the transit service per hour. Does not include replacing infrastructure, new vehicles or service expansion, but does include fuel, labour and vehicle maintenance.

• Operating cost per passenger trip: The more passengers that use a system per hour, the more efficient the transit system, and is more cost effective overall.

• Passenger trips per capita: The amount that people in a region are using the local transit systems.

• Passenger trips per service hour: How productive a transit network is, based on how in demand the service is with customers.

• Passenger trip intensity: Another indicator of productivity, adjusted for the service hours per capita. A higher score indicates the transit systems are aligned with local demand.